Creating a screencast on iPad

A colleague shared a link on Yammer tothis article about screencasting from an iPad.

I decided to try Explain Everything app which is recommended in the article.

It is easy to use, although it did seem to take a while when trying to import images from Dropbox or Evernote.

It took about 10 minutes to put together a few slides and record a sample video. This is no masterpiece but gives an idea of possibilities.

In a nutshell, the app enables creation of a slide deck, and the presentation of the slides can be recorded to add voice.

Research Impact via Google Scholar Data

For the last two weeks I have relocated temporarily to the research office to assist with preparation for ERA 2012. Although not essential to the ERA preparation, one of the tools that has come into my view is Harzing's Publish or Perish.

This is a fairly simple application that uses data from Google Scholar to calculate citation counts, cites/year, and a number of indices for research impact. Since research repositories tend to be very well covered by Google and Google Scholar it's interesting to see the number of article publishers that are repositories rather than publishing companies.



Sorting the list by title it's easy to see the duplication of articles across the publisher and the repositories. It would be interesting to look into the number of citations of repository vs publisher entries, especially where the repository version is an open-access article. But I will leave that for others to do. Another complication for tracking down true impact results for an article is the additional duplication of records for an article across multiple repositories where authors move from one institution to another, and where authors of one article are spread across multiple institutions.

It looks handy for tracking down publications that might not be well-covered in databases that focus on the traditional research outputs, but that are indexed in Google Scholar.

Entries in the list can be deselected from the calculations. Both statistics and citations can be copied to the clipboard as csv, txt and in a format pasteable in Excel.


Patrick Dunleavy posted a step-by-step guide for use of the application.


Image by MarcelGermain Photo license: Some rights reserved

Hey Evi

I've just given the voice recognition search called Evi a go. It was very good at recognising my voiced questions - Better than google voice search and better than dragon dictation. Some think this will be a competitor to Siri. As I don't plan to update my phone and Apple doesn't see fit to release Siri for it, they just might be very right. There are a few features it will need before its a true alternative, but I was impressed.

Web search is targeted, local time queries came back with the answer and a unit conversion were all good.

I think it needs some more local information to enhance its responses.

And I'd like to have some email, Evernote and Send to other apps integrations.

99c in the app store.

I’ll read that later, on my Kindle app

I recently saw a tweet from a friend wishing for a send-it-to-my-ipad” function on the desktop so that reading documents can be easily done on the ipad at a later time, or in a more convenient location (such as a comfy lounge chair, or under a shady tree).

A day or two later the Send it to Kindle for PC came into view in my RSS subscriptions, and then yesterday the Send it to Kindle bookmarklet for for Google Chrome appeared. It appears to work in Firefox too. There is also a Firefox extension called KindleIt which I haven’t tried yet.  In effect these applications can send-it-to-my-ipad albeit via Amazon’s cloud services.

The bookmarklet is simple to install and requires authorisation at the Amazon end, and a setting at the browser end so it knows to which Amazon account to send the documents.

The Windows app was a little more problematic to get organised as I was doing this on my work laptop with all the complications of network configurations. The application has to be registered so that it knows which Amazon account to work with, but to register it required the proxy settings to be recorded in the options. But the application won’t launch (to adjust the proxy settings) until it has been registered. Catch-22! In the end I disconnected from the network, connected to my iPhone hotspot to register, then reconnected to the network and adjusted the proxy settings. It works – although one of my word documents was full of images and Word drawings and the personal documents processing at Amazon didn’t know what to do with that one. But, the other Word document I sent was readable even though it contained a table.

Send to Kindle for PC application offers some options to give the document a different title or author, whether to use Whispernet, or only Wi-Fi and which device to deliver it to. Also if you want it archived. It is a free download and works with Word and PDF files and others.

 

 

 

 

The application can be invoked from either the Print menu in the document application, or with a right-click from Windows explorer or on a document icon.

 

When a document is sent to Kindle an email notification is sent advising that the document is ready, or not processed.

The browser extension worked easily, sending a web page to my iPad – but for some reason I cannot authorise it to send to my iPhone.

Document appearing in my iPhone Kindle app.

Document appearing in my iPad Kindle app.

Once your documents have been sent to Kindle you manage them via your Amazon account which can hold up to 5GB of files.

Trying a new chair

My kneelsit chair arrived the other day. I'm hoping that it might help with niggling discomfort in my back and ribs.

I was expecting it might take a bit of effort to assemble, but it was pretty quick and easy.


This video was made with an iPhone app called StopMotion.

Will update or write a new post when I have tried it for a few weeks.